Voigtländer Ultron lens · announced May 15, 2023
Voigtländer Ultron 27mm F2 X review
27 mm · f/2 · 120 g · 6 elements in 4 groups
Verdict
The Ultron 27mm f/2 is a 120g all-metal pancake lens for Fuji X, with manual focus only. At f/2 it lets in twice as much light as Fujifilm's 27mm f/2.8 pancake. Focus falls off quickly, so your subject stands out from the background.
For small-Fuji owners who like to set the focus and aperture before they shoot, and who want a metal lens more than autofocus.
In detail
The Voigtländer Ultron 27mm F2 X is a lens for people who've decided they don't need autofocus. Cosina makes it in Japan, and designed it for Fujifilm's X mount only. It has electronic contacts, a distance scale and a focus tab, and no focus motor at all. Electronic contacts are small metal pins that let the lens and the camera share information. The focus tab is a small lever on the focus ring, so your finger can turn the ring and feel where it is.
Cosina announced the Ultron on May 15, 2023, and it went on sale that June at ¥73,000. Owners have posted sample photos from it in r/fujifilm ever since. Cosina's first X-mount lens was the Nokton 35mm F1.2 X in 2021. The Ultron has the same design: metal, manual focus and electronic contacts.
The lens is small. Inside are six pieces of glass, called elements, in four groups. One is an extra-low-dispersion element, a special glass that keeps colour fringes down. There's no aspherical glass.
The aperture is the opening that lets light in, and thin metal blades form it. The Ultron has ten straight blades. It focuses down to 25 cm, takes 43 mm filters and measures 59.3 × 23.5 mm. The spec sheet says 120g, but on a scale it's closer to 114g without the hood. The aperture ring clicks in third stops from f/2 to f/22. A stop is a doubling or halving of the light, so a third stop is a small step. A thin metal screw-in hood comes in the box, with a metal cap for it.
Fuji X cameras have an APS-C sensor, which is smaller than a full-frame sensor. To compare views, people use the equivalent focal length. That's the full-frame focal length that shows the same view. On APS-C, this 27mm lens gives a 40mm-equivalent view and a 53.7° angle of view. That's a little tighter than the 35mm-equivalent view of the X100 cameras and Fujifilm's 23mm lenses. It's a little wider than a 50mm lens, the classic "normal" view.
I shot mine through a monsoon week on two bodies. One was an X-E5, which has in-body stabilisation (IBIS). IBIS means the camera moves its sensor to cancel the shake of your hands. The other was an X-T30 III, which has no IBIS.
The electronic contacts tell the camera which lens is on it. So focus peaking, focus check, the distance display and IBIS all work. Focus peaking colours the sharp edges in the viewfinder, so you can see what's in focus. Focus check zooms in on the view so you can focus precisely. The camera also saves the aperture you set on the ring into the EXIF. EXIF is the data the camera saves inside each photo, such as the aperture and shutter speed.
On the X-T30 III, I shot almost everything at f/8 with zone focusing. Zone focusing means you set the focus to a distance ahead of time. Then you shoot anything in that zone without focusing again. The hard infinity stop made this easy. The ring stops at infinity and doesn't turn past it, so I could set the lens by feel and stop looking at it.
Fred Miranda measured the Ultron against the XF 23mm F2 R WR on an X-Pro3. At f/2, he found the Voigtländer had slightly more contrast in the centre. The Fuji was clearly better in the far corners. Stopping down means using a smaller aperture, like f/5.6 instead of f/2. As he stopped down, the Fuji got better faster. The Voigtländer kept improving up to f/8, where its corners closed most of the gap.
Lenses with aspherical glass sometimes show rings inside blurred lights, like the rings of a cut onion. The Ultron has no aspherical glass, so its blurred lights come out clean. Its ten blades are straight, so bright lights turn into sharp ten-point stars from about f/2.8. Photographers call these sunstars. With Fujifilm's autofocus lenses, you need about f/11 or smaller to get them.
Coma makes small points of light, like street lamps at night, look like little comets instead of dots. On this lens you can see coma at f/2 in night city shots. It's mostly gone at f/2.8 and fully gone by f/4.
Fujifilm released firmware updates for several bodies around May 2024. Firmware is the camera's own software. After those updates, some newer bodies started saving f/22 in the EXIF, whatever aperture was set on the ring. Fred Miranda confirmed this on the X-T5 and X-T50. He didn't see it on the X-T30 II, X-E4 or X-Pro3. At his last update, neither Cosina nor Fujifilm had answered him about it.
I didn't see this bug. Every frame from my X-E5 and X-T30 III saved the aperture I set.
Pros and cons
What we like
- Sharp in the centre at f/2.
- The change from sharp to blurred is short, so subjects stand out.
- Blurred lights come out clean, with no rings inside them.
- Ten straight blades turn bright lights into ten-point stars from about f/2.8.
- All metal, with a focus tab and a hard stop at infinity.
- The camera knows the lens is on, so focus aids, stabilisation and photo data work.
- Focuses as close as 25 cm, close enough for small details.
I'd buy the Ultron for how its photos look. Focus falls off quickly behind the subject, and the change from sharp to soft is short. So subjects stand out from the background more than with Fujifilm's small f/2 lenses, which owners call Fujicrons.
At the 25 cm minimum focus, the background goes nearly smooth. Between about 0.7 m and 2 m, bright blurred lights get a thin outline. Voigtländer lenses are known for that outline. The lens is sharp in the centre from f/2, so you don't have to stop down to get a sharp photo.
It's built better than any other lens this size. It's all metal, with engraved and painted distance marks. The aperture ring has firm clicks. The focus ring turns smoothly with a soft, even drag, and you'll want to turn it just for the feel. Jay Massie said the focus ring is "as smooth as a buttered jellyfish with just enough resistance for precise and accurate control." It's a strange sentence, and it's also exactly right.
Flare is the haze and coloured spots you get when a bright light shines into the lens. The Ultron handles flare very well, which makes sense for a design with only six elements and modern coatings. I shot straight into a low sun on a bridge at f/8. I got the sunstar with no haze and no ghosting worth mentioning.
The lens has mild pincushion distortion, which bends straight lines near the edges a little. Its corners are also a little darker, which is called vignetting. The lens profile fixes both by itself, in Lightroom and in the camera. So the files you work with are clean.
And it stays small. The 120g lens on a 445g X-E5 makes 565g for the whole camera. The barrel sticks out less than the grip on most bodies. Owners on the DPReview forums confirmed early on that a 43 mm filter and the hood fit together without dark corners.
Trade-offs
- No autofocus.
- Everything past a few metres is in a tiny turn of the focus ring.
- At f/2 the corners are softer than the XF 23mm F2 R WR's, until about f/8.
- No weather sealing, on a lens people put on sealed X-Pro and X-T bodies.
- Since firmware updates in 2024, some Fuji bodies save f/22 as the aperture.
- Around $600, about 1.5 times the price of Fujifilm's 27mm with autofocus.
There's no autofocus, and no version of this lens will ever have it. Fuji's manual focus aids do most of the work. They include peaking, focus check, the digital split image and the focus meter. Once your finger learns where the tab is, zone focusing is quick. But people and animals that move in ways you can't predict are harder to shoot. You'll miss frames you wouldn't miss with a Fujicron.
The focus ring turns about 100 degrees from end to end. Much of that turn is spent between 25 cm and 1 m. So everything from a few metres to infinity fits in a small part of the turn. One DPReview owner sold his copy for this reason. He said precise focus between about eight feet and infinity was "extremely difficult." He went back to the XF 16mm and 35mm F2. At f/8 you can zone focus and the problem goes away. At f/2 at middle distances, you have to focus precisely, and that's hard.
The corners are the weak spot at f/2. Against the XF 23mm F2 R WR, the Voigtländer is clearly behind at the far edges at f/2. It needs f/8 to get close. Someone in r/fujifilm posted a side-by-side with the XF 27mm F2.8 R WR, and it showed the same thing. The Fuji looked brighter and more even from edge to edge. The Voigtländer was sharper in the middle and softer at the edges, with different colour. If you shoot landscapes at 27mm and zoom in to check the corners, the Fuji pancake is the better tool.
There's no weather sealing. Weather sealing means rubber seals that keep rain and dust out of the lens. People raise it in every forum thread about this lens, and it's a fair complaint. Many buyers put the Ultron on X-Pro and X-E bodies that are sealed.
Nobody has fixed the f/22 EXIF bug, as far as any public statement says. Owners fix the photo data afterwards with Lens Tagger or exiftool, two tools that rewrite EXIF.
The Ultron costs around $600 for a manual lens. Fujifilm's own 27mm pancake costs around $399, with autofocus and sealing. The Viltrox 27mm costs even less. With the Ultron, you pay for the metal and the brighter f/2 aperture. You also pay for the quick fall from sharp to soft, and for a slower way of working.
Who is this for
Buy the Ultron if you enjoy setting the camera and focusing by hand as much as you enjoy the photos. It suits you if you already own a small Fuji body and keep looking at X100 photos and videos. It's good for street, travel and everyday documentary photos at a 40mm-equivalent view. And it suits people who set the focus and aperture ahead of time, then wait for a picture at that distance.
On an X-Pro3, you get parallax correction in the optical finder. The optical finder is a separate window, so it sees a slightly different view from the lens. Parallax correction moves the frame lines so they match what the lens sees. The hard infinity stop also lines up properly. With both, an X-Pro3 and this lens work like a rangefinder, the old style of camera with a separate viewfinder window.
Skip it if you photograph children, dogs or anything else that won't hold still. Skip it too if you need weather sealing. And skip it if you shoot landscapes at this focal length and care about the corners. The XF 27mm F2.8 R WR is smaller, sealed, has autofocus and costs less. In return, it opens only to f/2.8, so it lets in half the light. It also gives up the Ultron's quick fall from sharp to soft. The XF 23mm F2 R WR is the better all-round lens by most measurements. It's nearly twice the weight and shows a wider view.
If your camera has no IBIS, think about shutter speed. On my X-T30 III, the lens was fine at f/8 in daylight. But the lens has no stabiliser of its own, and the camera can't keep the shutter speed above a safe minimum for you. On an X-E5, X-T5, X-S20 or any other IBIS body, the sensor steadies the picture while you turn the ring. That lets you hold the camera by hand at slower shutter speeds at dusk.
My advice if you buy one: leave it on the camera for a month before you go back to autofocus. The first week feels clumsy. By the second week, your finger knows where the tab is, and you choose the focus point yourself.
Sample photos
Every frame below was shot on the Ultron 27mm F2 X by us. Settings come from the EXIF the lens wrote into the file. Images are resized for the web and processed in Lightroom, so treat them as rendering references rather than resolution tests. Frames with a link open on masnun.photos, where the full-size file lives.
Full specifications
| Focal length | 27 mm |
|---|---|
| 35mm equivalent | 40 mm |
| Maximum aperture | f/2 |
| Minimum aperture | f/22 |
| Optical construction | 6 elements in 4 groups |
| Special elements | 1 extra-low-dispersion element, no aspherical glass |
| Min. focus distance | 0.25 m |
| Max. magnification | 0.15× |
| Aperture blades | 10 |
| Filter thread | 43 mm |
| Diameter × length | 59.3 × 23.5 mm |
| Weight | 120g |
| Weather sealing | No |
| Min. operating temp | — |
| Focus drive | Manual focus only |
| Optical stabilization | No |
| Announced | May 15, 2023 |
Rating breakdown
| Dimension | Score |
|---|---|
| Image quality | 9 / 10 |
| Focusing | 7 / 10 |
| Handling | 9 / 10 |
| Value | 7 / 10 |
Where to buy
The link below runs an Amazon search for this lens rather than pointing at one listing, because stock and sellers move around. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases — at no extra cost to you.
Ultron 27mm F2 XAmazon · search resultsCompare head-to-head
Sources and further reading
Specs come from the manufacturer. Measured optical behaviour and owner reports are attributed to the people who did the work:
- Our longer write-up: shooting the X-E5 with the Voigtländer 27mm f/2
- Voigtländer — 27 mm F2.0 Ultron X product page (specs and camera-communication notes)
- Fred Miranda — Voigtlander 27mm f/2 Ultron X-mount review (measured resolution, distortion, coma, sunstars, EXIF bug)
- Tudor Mateescu — Voigtländer Ultron 27mm f/2 X review
- Morten Byskov (5050 Travelog) — Voigtländer Ultron 27mm f/2 X review
- Michael (I Like Calculus) — "My favorite pancake lens"
- Jay Massie — Voigtländer Ultron 27mm f/2 Fuji-X mount review
- DPReview forums — "Opinions on VG 27mm f2 ULTRON" (focus-throw complaints, filter and hood fit)
- r/fujifilm — owner threads, sample sets, and the XF 27mm f/2.8 side-by-side
Still choosing?
If you are weighing this against the other small primes, the lens picker ranks them against how you actually shoot. If the body is still open too, start with the camera quiz.